According to ChainCatcher, Itô co-founder Affaan said the Itô team has joined trading firm Jump Trading and will be responsible for its compute trading business.
Affaan and co-founder Alejandro said the team will lead a newly formed internal compute trading desk at Jump Trading. They also said the desk has already started trading in what they described as a market that is still taking shape.
Itô had focused on the middle market for compute and inference costs
They said Itô was initially built around the idea of using a new contract market to help companies address centralized AI supply chain risks that existing systems have struggled to cover.
After speaking with more than 1,000 funds, companies, venture capital firms and related industry participants, the team decided to focus on the middle market for compute capacity and inference costs.
Affaan said common capacity contracts typically run for three to five years and require about 30% to be paid upfront. By contrast, revenue at companies from the late-seed stage through Series C is often settled monthly and based on usage, while secondary market prices for in-demand chips can also swing sharply.
He added that the total contract value of relevant mid-sized market clusters can at times range from hundreds of millions of dollars to the mid-hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why the team chose an internal desk structure at Jump
Itô had previously built its platform as an end buyer. Team members have backgrounds in Goldman Sachs credit basket business, open-source engineering tools, and research on supercomputing clusters.
Affaan said Jump Trading's capabilities in credit, risk control, trading experience, and hardware led the team to pursue the business through an internal trading desk.